Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Refuses to Withdraw Film on Petlura

May 19, 1960

MONTREAL (May. 18)

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation today refused to bow to demands of Ukrainians in this country that it withdraw a television program documenting the trial in Paris, in 1926, of Sholom Schwartzbard, a Jew wh shot and killed the anti-Semitic Ukrainian President Simon Petlura. The program, on the air every Tuesday night for the last few weeks over the French-language television network of the CBC, went on last night as scheduled.

About 800 Ukrainians have been picketing the local headquarters of CBC this week, demanding the cancelation of the filmed TV show which was produced in France. The Ukrainians charged that the film was “inspired assassination,” “exalts vengeance” and “envenoms relations between Jews and Ukrainians in Canada.”

In Parliament at Ottawa, today, Minister of Revenues George Nowland not only denied all these claims but said also that he is investigating a report that K. Rohowsky, secretary of the Canadian Ukrainian Committee, here, admitted he was backed by relatives of the late Gen. Petlura.

Petlura, a nationalist leader in Ukrainia, set up an independent Ukrainian Government after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. During his brief regime, many thousands of Jew were killed in pogroms. Schwartzbard shot him on a Paris street in 1926 and was acquitted by a French court when he claimed he was entitled to vengeance for the murder of many Jews.

Alphonse Ouimet, head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, in announcing today that the TV program will not be canceled, denied a claim by the Ukrainians who said the film had been banned in France. On the contrary, he said, the film had been made for the television program of Radiodiffusion Francaise, the French Government-owned broadcasting company. M. Ouimet said the program is based on the records of the Schwartzbard trial and “reconstructs the trial as it took place.”